Woe to these people who have no appetite for the very dish that their age serves up.

The bad novelist constructs his characters; he directs them and makes them speak. The true novelist listens to them and watches them act; he hears their voices even before he knows them.

Humanity cherishes its swaddling clothes; but it shall not grow up unless it can free itself from them. Turning down his mother's breast does not make the weaned child ungrateful. ... Rise up naked, valiant; make the sheaths crack; push aside the stakes; to grow straight you need no more than the thrust of your sap and the call of the sun.

A straight path never leads anywhere except to the objective.

Too chaste an adolescence makes for a dissolute old age. It is doubtless easier to give up something one has known than something one imagines.

In hell there is no other punishment than to begin over and over again the tasks left unfinished in your lifetime.

What another would have done as well as you, do not do it. What another would have said as well as you, do not say it; what another would have written as well, do not write it. Be faithful to that which exists nowhere but in yourself - and thus make yourself indispensable.